How carriers and shippers can strengthen partnerships amid trucking market pressures
Key takeaways
- Focus on delivering freight on time, safely, and without damage to build trust with shippers.
- Understand and align with shippers' business principles, emphasizing transparency and communication through technology.
- Leverage automation and AI thoughtfully, ensuring they add value without compromising relationships.
- Prepare for future industry shifts by adopting connected operations and strategic technology integration.
- Prioritize company culture and core values over technology for sustainable success and customer loyalty.
It’s no secret that the trucking industry has seen better days. The pandemic flooded capacity into the market, and now that shipments have normalized, that excess capacity has yet to exit the market, forcing trucking companies to accept less-profitable loads and leaving them strapped for cash. When times are uncertain, it’s essential to have reliable shipping partners. But how can a carrier build and retain that partnership?
At the 2025 McLeod Software User Conference, a panel sought to help fleet owners and carriers answer that question. The panel included Chris Hummer, CEO of Don Hummer Trucking, a 70-year-old dedicated trucking company; Tracy Reiss, CEO of KBX Logistics, which moves more than 2.5 million loads annually for companies such as Georgia Pacific and others; and Jett McCandless, CEO of Project 44, a cloud-based platform that tracks millions of shipments across the globe each day via data integration.
These three panelists broke down what it takes to build and maintain a strong carrier-shipper relationship.
Delivering on carrier fundamentals: On-time performance, safety, and customer loyalty
No matter what’s happening in the industry—be it the recession of 2008-2009 or the global pandemic in 2020—Chris Hummer said what has made his company successful is simply keeping focus on delivering for its customers. To him, that means delivering on carrier fundamentals.
“People want you to pick up their freight on time,” Hummer explained. “They want you to deliver their freight on time. They want you to do so without crashing the trunk.”
Hummer also stressed the importance of safety within the industry—the safety of his drivers, the truck, and, of course, the customer’s load.
Don Hummer Trucking’s customer base consists of nearly 100% direct customers with very little spot loads or transactional freight, Hummer said.
“The vast majority of those customers have been with us five or more years, and we really just like to boil it out to the basics,” he explained.
Don Hummer Trucking is able to retain its loyal customer base by delivering on these simple yet key aspects.
For KBX Logistics, a high-capacity shipper, those simple aspects also ring true—and so is having a carrier partner that understands KBX’s business.
“With the volume we do and the amount of automation in that volume, it is really important to us that [carriers] understand our business,” Reiss said, “and that we're not dealing with it a little at a time, but spending much more time figuring out how we can get better together.”
It also matters that carriers have similar principles with KBX Logistics, Reiss said, as KBX Logistics is a principle-based organization that aims to partner with carriers, shippers, and technology providers with similar goals to eliminate waste and increase sustainability across the supply chain.
And, sometimes, that relationship requires technology for shipment transparency and communication.
Leveraging trucking technology and real-time connectivity for stronger shipper partnerships
KBX Logistics connects to multiple carrier partners’ application programming interfaces (APIs), which allows KBX to track its shipments “every five to 10 minutes,” Reiss explained. And “what's important to us is that the digital footprint and the physical footprint match as close to real time as practical,” she said.
If the digital footprint and the physical footprint are matched, Reiss hopes AI will eventually become a bigger player, being able to automate tasks to enable KBX to “level up the strategic relationships” it has with its carriers.
Don Hummer Trucking isn’t a stranger to technology; the company has been a McLeod Software customer for three decades. If a customer requests Don Hummer use a particular piece of tech, the company is up for the challenge, Hummer explained.
Yet, as a 300-truck carrier out of Iowa, Hummer believes that most of Don Hummer Trucking’s decision-making boils down to the company culture, not necessarily the desire to use cutting-edge technology, or specifically automation, especially if that means compromising the relationship with a shipper.
“I don't want to automate ourselves out of a relationship,” Hummer said, adding that while the company is open to new technologies, anything that doesn’t add value to the company might not be worth it to Don Hummer Trucking. “We're up for whatever technology ride anybody wants to go on, but we want to make sure it's a good fit and at the end of the day furthers the mission for everyone.”
Though technology can add value in multiple areas of transportation, Hummer believes that delivering safely and on time carries more weight than the ability to quickly push data that “no one is using.”
Don Hummer Trucking and KBX Logistics might rely heavily on their partner relationships, but will those relationships matter in the future?
Project 44’s McCandless said that shippers are dealing with a lot these days, namely three main trends: macroeconomic headwinds, such as geopolitics, labor strikes, and natural disasters; value squeeze, including pressure from corporate leaders to do more with less; and AI mandates coming from the C-suite.
Because of these challenges, McCandless said that most shippers’ focus is mainly on selling their inventory. “No shipper out there really cares about trucks or containers or freight or cargo,” he said.
Instead, shippers are more concerned about the transparency of their inventory in motion, and that’s where connectivity comes into play.
“If a company can have that connectivity to all those delivery assets, then they can associate that with a selling order, or [purchase order], or part number, or SKU, or any type of thing like that,” McCandless said. “That's what matters in their world.”
Hummer believes inventory transparency and relationships go hand in hand. Identifying where the inventory is moving and how much is moving helps Hummer leverage his relationships and work with his shipping partners to determine whether lightweighting equipment can help them move more freight, whether eliminating or adding warehouses would be beneficial, and more to benefit both Don Hummer Trucking and its carrier partners.
Preparing carriers for the future: AI adoption, efficiency gains, and shipper expectations
Artificial intelligence is likely to revolutionize every industry within the next few years, and the transportation and trucking industries won’t be immune. Many of the companies that use Project 44 are already working on their automation goals using both agentic AI and robots, he said.
Efficiency is also likely to be a driving force behind business decision-making in the future, and with connected operations, any missteps or inefficiencies of a trucking company will become even more visible to the shipper.
To minimize the risk of being left behind when trucking’s tech revolution takes full effect, it’s essential that carriers and trucking companies begin implementing technology now.
As Reiss advises, approach new technologies full steam ahead: “You’ve just got to run like the world is crumbling beneath your feet. Because at this point, it is.”
About the Author
Jade Brasher
Senior Editor Jade Brasher has covered vocational trucking and fleets since 2018. A graduate of The University of Alabama with a degree in journalism, Jade enjoys telling stories about the people behind the wheel and the intricate processes of the ever-evolving trucking industry.